File format for downloads - Attachment

Beginner Questions
1

:bullseye: What is your goal?

I am looking to download attachments via a Tally form into my data store.

:thinking: What is the problem?

I would like to store the file itself (PDF, etc.) rather than just the URL, similar to how it works in Airtable. Is this possible in Make?

3

You can store the binary representation but that will all depend on your data store size limit. Make accounts scale with 1Mb of data store size for ever 10,000 operation credits.

May not be a very cost effective way to do this.

4

Yes, but a Data Store doesn’t handle files like Airtable attachments. You can download the file from the Tally URL using an HTTP module, then store the file somewhere like Google Drive or another file-storage service and save the file URL/ID in the Data Store. If you need the actual binary file stored directly, the Data Store isn’t really designed for that.

5

You do realize the data store has a field called Binary Data right? Which is specifically for storing files?

image
image1107×885 58.6 KB

6

I actually hadn’t realized they extended the data store for binary data. It’s not a very cost efficient way still though. You have to get more operations for more data store storage. 1MB for every 1k operations I think is the ratio.

7

Yes, you can store the actual file rather than just the Tally URL.

In your scenario, take the attachment URL from Tally and pass it through HTTP → Get a file. That converts the URL into Make’s binary file data, which you can then map into your Data Store record along with the filename/content type.

So the flow would be:

Tally → HTTP (Get a file) → Data Store

One thing to watch for: if you expect a lot of PDFs or larger attachments, I’d use Drive/S3/Dropbox for the actual file storage and keep only the file ID/URL in the Data Store. That will be much cleaner long-term.